Seafood from Long Ago and Far Away
Our Town downtown
March 5, 2007
Oyster bars are back; fish n’ chips are now a New York tradition
A tiny six-seat oyster bar recently opened its diminutive door on Second Avenue in the East Village, tucked between a local drug store and a Turkish eatery. It’s got an upstairs that seats about twenty, but its half-size ground floor and its sign announcing, simply, OYSTER BAR, in painted capital letters, hearken back to late nineteenth century New York, where oyster stands were as commonplace as hot dog stands today and the streets were literally lined with oyster shells (that’s where Pearl Street gets its name).
Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar is actually not new, just moved from its previous location, which opened in 2003 in a carriage house on East Fifth Street between Second and Third Avenues, but this incarnation has got an understated old time quality that recalls the days when oysters could be hand harvested from the river and there was nothing noteworthy about an oyster bar around the corner. Gone are the red and white checked curtains and tablecloths that adorned the old restaurant, gone is the name, Jack’s, in cursive on the window.
This is just an oyster bar – still not as common a sight as a hot dog stand, but no longer such a rarity, either.
Oyster bars vanished from the city after the oysters all but disappeared from our rivers in the beginning of the 19th century. Grand Central Oyster Bar was in a niche of its own when it opened up in 1913 (serving imported oysters).
It was not until the past decade that oyster bars – not just seafood restaurants that sold oysters – started popping back up downtown. In 1997, Shaffer City Oyster Bar & Grill opened on West 21st Street and Pearl Oyster Bar started doing business on Cornelia Street. That year, there were nine oyster bars in Manhattan, according to Shaffer City owner A. Jay Shaffer. Then “oysters boomed big time.” This year there are 78, he says, although only a handful are of the real deal that offer dozens of different types of oysters.
“If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pearl Oyster Bar has certainly become one of the most flattered restaurants in New York, perhaps even in America,” Rebecca Charles, Pearl Oyster Bar’s owner, announces on her restaurant’s website.
Why the oyster bar boom? “I guess they figured out that specializing a restaurant helps sell food,” is Shaffer’s hypothesis.
Shaffer is even populating the waters as near as Long Island and as far as Nova Scotia with his own oyster beds: a traditional New York-style operation if ever there was one.
Then there are fish n’ chips, another down-by-the-docks tradition, but not an offering native to our seaport – until recently. Now we’ve got an authentic chip cutter from London on Greenwich Avenue and Tasmanian sea bass flown in twice weekly from Australia to be fried on Rivington Street.
From the British talk radio playing over the speakers to the Cockney accents behind the register and among the customers eating at the counter, A Salt & Battery feels like my best imagining of a British chippie. Nicky Perry and her husband opened the fish n’ chips shop in 2000, because the customers at their tiny West Village British tea shop kept asking where they could get them. (The last downtown fish n’ chips shop had closed a decade earlier.)
A Salt & Battery was such a hit that a second location seemed like a good idea. Perry and her husband got the keys to their East Village storefront on September 1, 2001, expecting to receive their building permit on September 15. Then 9/11 happened. For five months, the chippie-to-be sat vacant, digging the couple into a financial hole that would force them to close the Second Avenue shop prematurely.
Still, the Lower East Side would have its deep fried fish and eat them too, whether British or Aussie. As Perry, a Londoner, puts it, “everyone’s copying me. Everyone is doing it in their restaurants, at way more cost than I am.”
Bondi Road, named for the beach in Sydney whose image adorns the restaurant’s walls, began beer battering in 2006 in SoHo. The sit-down restaurant cum bar boasts on its website, “Whereas the English may have invented fish & chips, Australians perfected it.”
May be, but now we’ve incorporated the trend, and it’s become as New York as oysters.
A tiny six-seat oyster bar recently opened its diminutive door on Second Avenue in the East Village, tucked between a local drug store and a Turkish eatery. It’s got an upstairs that seats about twenty, but its half-size ground floor and its sign announcing, simply, OYSTER BAR, in painted capital letters, hearken back to late nineteenth century New York, where oyster stands were as commonplace as hot dog stands today and the streets were literally lined with oyster shells (that’s where Pearl Street gets its name).
Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar is actually not new, just moved from its previous location, which opened in 2003 in a carriage house on East Fifth Street between Second and Third Avenues, but this incarnation has got an understated old time quality that recalls the days when oysters could be hand harvested from the river and there was nothing noteworthy about an oyster bar around the corner. Gone are the red and white checked curtains and tablecloths that adorned the old restaurant, gone is the name, Jack’s, in cursive on the window.
This is just an oyster bar – still not as common a sight as a hot dog stand, but no longer such a rarity, either.
Oyster bars vanished from the city after the oysters all but disappeared from our rivers in the beginning of the 19th century. Grand Central Oyster Bar was in a niche of its own when it opened up in 1913 (serving imported oysters).
It was not until the past decade that oyster bars – not just seafood restaurants that sold oysters – started popping back up downtown. In 1997, Shaffer City Oyster Bar & Grill opened on West 21st Street and Pearl Oyster Bar started doing business on Cornelia Street. That year, there were nine oyster bars in Manhattan, according to Shaffer City owner A. Jay Shaffer. Then “oysters boomed big time.” This year there are 78, he says, although only a handful are of the real deal that offer dozens of different types of oysters.
“If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pearl Oyster Bar has certainly become one of the most flattered restaurants in New York, perhaps even in America,” Rebecca Charles, Pearl Oyster Bar’s owner, announces on her restaurant’s website.
Why the oyster bar boom? “I guess they figured out that specializing a restaurant helps sell food,” is Shaffer’s hypothesis.
Shaffer is even populating the waters as near as Long Island and as far as Nova Scotia with his own oyster beds: a traditional New York-style operation if ever there was one.
Then there are fish n’ chips, another down-by-the-docks tradition, but not an offering native to our seaport – until recently. Now we’ve got an authentic chip cutter from London on Greenwich Avenue and Tasmanian sea bass flown in twice weekly from Australia to be fried on Rivington Street.
From the British talk radio playing over the speakers to the Cockney accents behind the register and among the customers eating at the counter, A Salt & Battery feels like my best imagining of a British chippie. Nicky Perry and her husband opened the fish n’ chips shop in 2000, because the customers at their tiny West Village British tea shop kept asking where they could get them. (The last downtown fish n’ chips shop had closed a decade earlier.)
A Salt & Battery was such a hit that a second location seemed like a good idea. Perry and her husband got the keys to their East Village storefront on September 1, 2001, expecting to receive their building permit on September 15. Then 9/11 happened. For five months, the chippie-to-be sat vacant, digging the couple into a financial hole that would force them to close the Second Avenue shop prematurely.
Still, the Lower East Side would have its deep fried fish and eat them too, whether British or Aussie. As Perry, a Londoner, puts it, “everyone’s copying me. Everyone is doing it in their restaurants, at way more cost than I am.”
Bondi Road, named for the beach in Sydney whose image adorns the restaurant’s walls, began beer battering in 2006 in SoHo. The sit-down restaurant cum bar boasts on its website, “Whereas the English may have invented fish & chips, Australians perfected it.”
May be, but now we’ve incorporated the trend, and it’s become as New York as oysters.
Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar is newly relocated from 5th street where it was for years. I loved the prevous location and had several birthday dinners there, but I think the new JLOB location is crap and the food seems to have gone downhill a little in the new locale.
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courtney |
6:00 AM